Authors: J. G. Ballard
Mary lent me her typewriter, and over the next few weeks I
typed out all the stories I had written on the way back to
England. She read them very carefully, was clearly impressed
by them, and not in the least put off by the fact that they
were science fiction, which she had never read. She strongly
urged me to press on, though most of her friends regarded
science fiction as beyond the pale. But she sensed that there
was something original and fresh about this apparently
modest genre, that it was optimistic and positive, and drew
on qualities within my mind that had been repressed since
my arrival in England. The wilder side of my imagination
was its strength, and I needed to tap that, at least for the time being. From the very beginning she was convinced that I
would be a success as a writer.
Here she differed completely from my parents, who were
convinced that I would be a failure. Looking back, I am puzzled
by their lack of support, but they may have believed that
the wilder side of my imagination needed to be repressed,
not released. Mary tried to be charitable, but she disliked my
parents. As it happened, we saw little of them in the coming
years, and I now had all the emotional support I needed.
Mary listened for hours as I described the kind of fiction
I wanted to write, urging me to keep up a steady flow of
short stories and to ignore the strong hostility they provoked
from the s-f fans within the field. I submitted my stories to
the American s-f magazines that I had read in Moose Jaw,
but all came back to me, usually with very dismissive rejection
notes, which revealed the narrowness of mind that lurks
behind American exuberance. A fierce orthodoxy ruled, and
any attempt to enlarge the scope of traditional science
fiction was regarded as conspiratorial and underhand.
In due course Mary became pregnant, and we were married
in September 1955. Mary’s family, my parents and sister, and
a few friends attended the church service, which moved me
deeply. Three of us, in a sense, were being married – Mary, I
and our unborn child. I took the ceremony very seriously,
though not for religious reasons. My life had been witness to wars and destruction, to erosion and entropy, capped by two
years in the dissecting room at Cambridge, paring down the
cadavers as if death itself was not final enough, and the
remains of these human beings needed to be further
diminished. Now, for the first time, I had helped to create
something, almost out of nothing, an intact and growing
creature that would emerge as a living being. Mary was three
months pregnant when we married, and I would lie beside
her, touching the swelling of her womb, willing on this little
visitor from beyond time and space. Creation on the grandest
scale was taking place under the warmth of my hand.
I remember the wedding ceremony as a slightly disjointed
affair. The respective in-laws had not met each other, and the
old tribal defensiveness showed itself. Waiting for the clergyman
to arrive, I turned to my father in the pew behind me
and asked if I should leave a donation ‘for the poor of the
parish’. He replied, jovially: ‘You are the poor of the parish.’
He and my mother enjoyed the joke.
Strictly speaking, this was true. I made a small income
writing freelance advertising copy and direct-mail letters for
an agency I knew, but I needed a full-time job to support us
now that Mary had given up her post at the Express. Luckily
I had begun to sell my short stories to the two English
science fiction magazines,
Science Fantasy
and
New Worlds
,
and the first was published in 1956, a signal moment in any
writer’s career, especially that of a late starter like myself.
The editor, E.J. Carnell, was a thoughtful and likeable man who worked in a pleasant basement office near the Strand.
The walls were hung with posters of s-f films and magazine
covers that together conveyed a rather conventional view of
the nature of science fiction. In private, though, once he was
away from the old-guard fans, Carnell told me that science
fiction needed to change if it was to remain at the cutting
edge of the future. He urged me not to imitate the American
writers, and to concentrate on what I termed ‘inner space’,
psychological tales close in spirit to the surrealists. All this
was anathema to the American editors, who continued to
reject my fiction.
But we listened in 1957 to the radio call sign of Sputnik 1,
an urgent wake-up call from the next world and the dawn of
the Space Age. For the s-f traditionalists, Sputnik 1 confirmed
all their most precious dreams, but I was sceptical.
To hold its readers’ imaginations, I believed, science fiction
needed to be the harbinger of the new, not a reminder of the
old. Soon after, sure enough, science fiction went into a steep
decline in the United States, from which it didn’t recover
until the advent of
Star Wars
decades later.
Aware that I needed a job, with a wife and baby son to
support, Carnell arranged for me to get an editorial post on
one of the trade journals published by his parent company.
There were always vacancies because the firm paid so little
to its employees, from the editors down. Colleagues would
go out for a packet of cigarettes and never return. After six
months I too moved on to a better-paid post as deputy editor of the weekly journal
Chemistry & Industry
, published
by the Society of Chemical Industry in Belgrave Square.
After our wedding, Mary and I lived, first, in a flat in
Barrowgate Road, Chiswick, and then for several years
in a larger flat in Heathcote Road, St Margarets, near
Twickenham. Our son, James, was born in the Chiswick
Maternity Hospital, part of the NHS, but a strangely penal
institution that enshrined then-fashionable views about the
post-natal care of mothers and their babies. There was no
question of fathers being present at the delivery; we were
told to stay at home until called. When I arrived soon after
the birth I found Mary in a ward with five other mothers, all
weeping as they listened to their babies desperately crying in
a separate ward across the corridor. Mother and child were
only united during feeding times, set out in an inflexible
rota. When I protested I was told that it would be better if I
left the hospital.
Our daughters, Fay and Beatrice, were born in 1957 and
1959. Both were home deliveries, from the heart of a warm
domestic nest, and in which I actively participated, almost
shouldering the midwives aside. In the untidy but blissful
bed where our two daughters were conceived they were in
due course born, surrounded by Mary’s sisters and close
friends. I was profoundly moved as Fay’s head emerged into
the midwife’s waiting hands, just as I was two years later
when Bea arrived in the same bed. Far from being young, as
young as a human being can be, they seemed immensely old, their foreheads and features streamlined by time, as archaic
and smooth as the heads of pharaohs in Egyptian sculpture,
as if they had travelled an immense distance to find their
parents. Then, in a second, they became young and were
carried off by the midwife and Mary’s sister. Only a few
minutes earlier I had been kneeling beside the bed, pressing
back Mary’s large and bursting piles, and now I lay beside
her as she smiled, embraced me and fell asleep. I wept
steadily through both these deliveries, the greatest mystery
that life can offer, and I regret that so few babies, if any, are
born today in their own homes.
Once the children arrived our domestic world became
chaotic. Mary was never much of a housekeeper, but became
a kind of earth mother, sitting up in bed and breastfeeding a
baby while sipping a glass of wine and arguing in a strong
voice about some topic of the day with two of my men-
friends. One of the Twickenham GPs who looked after her
became quite besotted, and was happy to be called at any
hour of the day or night to sit on the bed beside her, a
romantic infatuation that she thought hilarious, even as she
was leading the poor man towards disciplinary proceedings
at the General Medical Council.
Despite the pressures of her new job as homemaker, wife
and mother of three, Mary tried to read everything I wrote.
For the first time I had someone who believed in me, and
was prepared to back that belief by putting up with a rather
modest life. She was always confident that one day I would be a success, which seemed unlikely in the late 1950s, when
science fiction was generally regarded as not much better
than the comic strips.
In 1960, as our toddlers found their legs, we decided we
needed a home with a garden, and bought a small house
in Shepperton, where I live to this day. I think I chose
Shepperton because of its film studios, which gave it a
slightly raffish air. Mary assumed that we would stay there
for no more than six months, but three years later, after the
success of
The Drowned World
, there still seemed little hope
of moving, which I think depressed her, as did the literary
world as a whole.
We began to meet other writers, both in and out of the
s-f world, and she realised that even successful writers in
England had rather humdrum lives. Publishers’ parties and
writers’ boozy blow-outs in Clapham flats did not compare
with the life of hunt balls and fast cars she had left behind in
Stone. I am sure that we would have eventually moved to a
detached house with a big garden in Barnes or Wimbledon,
but even that would have been very tame compared with the
world of well-to-do farmers and landowners, Lagondas and
lavish dances.
All the same, I hope that her years here were happy. I tried
to share the load, and enjoyed every minute I spent with
the children, watching them create their own universes out
of a few toys, treats and games. I knew that I was enjoying
a family life I had never really known, even in pre-war Shanghai. I had rarely seen my parents in a relaxed, domestic
mood. Their lives were too busy, and everything took place
in the silent presence of Chinese servants and the bored
White Russian nannies. Our home in Shepperton, by contrast,
was a chaotic, friendly brawl, as a naked parent
dripping from the bath broke up a squabble between
the girls over a favourite crayon, while their brother triumphantly
strutted in his mother’s damp footprints.
Mayhem ruled.
To give Mary a break, I often heaped the three toddlers
into their huge pram, a stretch limousine of the perambulator
world, and would push them down to the splash
meadow a few hundred yards from our house. The river
Ash, little more than a stream, emerged from a culvert and
crossed the road, flanked by a pedestrian bridge where an
appreciative crowd would lean on the rail and watch unsuspecting
motorists strand their stalled cars in the stream. The
scene in
Genevieve
, where the antique car is stranded in the
village pond, was filmed here. My children loved to watch
the whole hilarious spectacle, chortling and stamping as a
nonplussed driver finally lowered his feet into the water,
under the gaze of a sinister yokel and his offspring.
We spent hours with little fish nets, hunting for shrimps,
which were always taken home in jam jars and watched as
they refused to cooperate and gave up the ghost. Fay and
Bea were fascinated by the daisies that seemed to grow
underwater when the stream rose to flood the meadow. Shepperton Studios were easy to enter in those wonderful
summers nearly fifty years ago, and I would take the children
past the sound stages to the field where unwanted props
were left to the elements: figureheads of sailing ships, giant
chess-pieces, half an American car, stairways that led up to
the sky and amazed my three infants. And their father: days
of wonder that I wish had lasted for ever.
I thought of my children then, and still think of them, as
miracles of life, and I dedicate this autobiography to them.
In 1956, the year that I published my first short story,
I visited a remarkable exhibition at the Whitechapel Art
Gallery, This is Tomorrow. Recently I told Nicholas Serota,
director of the Tate and a former director of the Whitechapel,
that I thought This is Tomorrow was the most
important event in the visual arts in Britain until the
opening of Tate Modern, and he did not disagree.
Among its many achievements, This is Tomorrow is
generally thought of as the birthplace of pop art. A dozen
teams, involving an architect, a painter and sculptor, each
designed and built an installation that would embody their
vision of the future. The participants included the artist
Richard Hamilton, who displayed his collage
Just what is it
that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?
, in my
judgement the greatest ever work of pop art. Another of the
teams brought together the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, and
the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, who constructed a
basic unit of human habitation in what would be left of the world after nuclear war. Their terminal hut, as I thought of
it, stood on a patch of sand, on which were laid out the basic
implements that modern man would need to survive: a
power tool, a bicycle wheel and a pistol.
The overall effect of This is Tomorrow was a revelation to
me, and a vote of confidence, in effect, in my choice of
science fiction. The Whitechapel exhibition, and especially
the Hamilton and Paolozzi exhibits, created a huge stir in the
British art world. At the time the artists most in favour with
the Arts Council, the British Council and the academic
critics of the day were Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth,
John Piper and Graham Sutherland, who together formed a
closed fine art world largely preoccupied with formalist
experiment. The light of everyday reality never shone into
the aseptic whiteness of their studio-bound imaginations.